Is it a Star or is it an Angel on Fire?

Or

The Not-So-Wise Men

Two thousand years ago, give or take a year, thousands of miles away, give or take a mile, a great procession of wise men, councillors and counsellors, astronomers and astrologers, doctors and quacks, and anyone else who wanted to travelled from the east to visit a baby born in a stable. Except. Except they weren’t that wise. For instance, untold numbers of men had set out, but only three had thought to bring presents. Even then, they didn’t bring anything useful like nappies or talcum powder…

“Onward, peers, to…umm,” the regally dressed dignitary fizzled out shortly after he started. He was supposed to be leading the caravan of several hundred wise men- there weren’t any kings available- but he wasn’t any good at it.

“You haven’t forgotten where we’re going again, have you, Melchior?” the second-in-command asked poignantly, putting his gold earrings down to place his hands on his hips emphatically.

“Where are we going again?” the wizened man on the third camel asked, genuinely curious. When everyone got on their camels back home, he thought they were all going for the Christmas dinner so he naturally he tagged along. His suspicions to the contrary were aroused when they entered Asia Minor.

“After observing a great celestial event, we four hundred wise men have concluded that a great king will be born. We figure that if he’s going to be that great, we might as well get on his good side now,” Caspar, the second wise man, explained knowledgably. He secretly feared that their“great celestial event” was just spilt cappuccino foam on their instruments and now they were just lost, but he couldn’t let the others down. After all, he had promised the switch to Darjeeling last year.

“So where are we going?” the fourth wise man down the line asked, realising what the second and the third wise men had missed, that Caspar has purposefully dodged the question. He wasn’t a wise man for nothing. In fact, he wasn’t a wise man at all; he was a local R.E teacher and he was waiting to see how long he could go without them noticing. It could take awhile.

“We’re going to Jerusalem to where the new king will be born.” Balthasar, the third wise man explained. He knew where they were going but he didn’t know where they were going was. All he knew was if they reached Rome, they had probably gone too far. Probably. He pointed to Caspar's gold earrings (they weren’t really his, but his wife’s but she didn’t were them anymore), “And when we get there, we’re going to give him these three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

“Gold earrings? Won’t he be a bit young for those? How do you know he even has pierced ears?” the fourth man argued. Personally, he would have gone with gold bangles. Everyone loves bangles. Especially that song, Walk like an Egyptian. A classic in its own right.

“Well, at least I got him a present!” Caspar snapped irately at the misplaced teacher. If everyone was going to pick at him about the gold, he was going to throw them away at the next rest stop. However, he also worried that another strange talking man was going to chat him up there. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to keep the earrings in his own ears. “What did you get the king?”

“Are you sure we’re headed for Jerusalem?” the sixth wise man in the line asked. After all, it was a nice place to visit but it was a shame about the Romans. What had the Romans done for them anyway?

“Of course we are!” Melchior rebuffed acidly. There were more wise men in the caravan than he could be bothered to count and he’d be damned if he’d have to answer the queries of every single man in the line. “We’re going to see a king; do you think we’re going to find him out in the Styx? Of course not!”

“About this king…” the seventh man started up now that everyone before him had had their say. In actuality, the seventh wise man was a woman wearing an unconvincing beard. Thankfully, none of the wise men was wise enough to notice.

“Yes,” the third wise man in the procession, Balthasar, nodded slowly, uncertain that he was going to like what was coming next. The seventh wise man was just a little too…effeminate. The lipstick was beginning to disturb him.

“Well, are we sure it’s a king we’re going to see? What if it’s a queen?” Instantly, as one, the entire caravan came to a halt. The six wise men in front turned around and stared at her and she could feel the glares she was receiving from the several hundred behind. In her heart, the seventh wise man had always been a feminist. Malchior’s face transcended so many colours, it even exhausted the ones on his robes. Before he had a chance to unleash his fury on his fellow wise man, Balthasar spoke up.

“Don’t…talk of such things,” he muttered dismissively, waving his hand without effort. If anyone ever decided to write this journey down, even in only a few sentences or on some obscure original fiction internet site, he prayed that it wouldn’t be taken as gospel truth. He wasn’t sure what the internet was, or more accurately, would be, or gospel, for that matter. At least for the moment.

“Now does anyone else have anything they want to ask before we get going again? If we hurry, we may be able to catch the mother’s post-natal classes.” Caspar asked, rolling up his sleeves. The caravan stretched back so far, the rearguard was still in the stables. It may take a while.

The procession erupted in the clamorous voices of a thousand different questions.

“What’s the latest score in the arena?”

“Why do we wear tea towels on our heads?”

“Laodicea two, Rome nil,”

“Hey, my hat is at the cleaners,”

“I just don’t know what to make of the emperor’s new team,”

“Oh, your hat is always at the cleaners!”

“Caspar looks like a puff with those earrings!”

“What are we using to dry the dishes if we’re wearing the tea towels?”

“Umm, hats?”

“One at a time, one at a time,” Balthasar pleaded, rubbing his temples gingerly. They had been travelling for a few months now and he had something of a headache. There was no way he was going to wait more than a thousand years for the invention of aspirin. It was easier to get several hundred men on camels quieten down; still, even that proved difficult.

“Which way are we going?”

Total silence.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Caspar asked rhetorically, convinced by his own logic that he was right. It had never proved him wrong yet. It was especially useful for pointing out the flaws in anyone else’s logic.

“No,” the caravan resounded, Melchior and Balthasar included.

“Tch!” Caspar clicked his tongue, flipping his tea towel out of his eyes. It was a nice tea towel; the children had bought it as a souvenir during a quick jaunt to India. He cleared his throat; they would all have to hear this. “We shall follow the Star of Jerusalem to the new-born king. The heavens shall guide us right to maternity ward B.”

“So which one is the Star of Jerusalem?” the eighth wise man asked, squinting up at the sky. He was actually the ninth wise man but the eighth had fallen behind and was now somewhere around the three-hundred-and eighty-sixth wise man.

“It’s that really big and bright one. I mean the really big one.” Caspar announced proudly, without even looking up at the night sky. A Persian wave rippled through the crowd as the wise men looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Uh, Cas?” Melchior had his camel trot up next to Caspar’s. He, rather magnanimously, tilted his friend’s head up. Caspar nodded enthusiastically; yes, there was the Star of Jerusalem in the sky. It was really bright tonight. “Caspar, that really big star is the moon. We’re not following that. It’s not the Star of Jerusalem.”

“Oh…okay, then.” Caspar answered, a little dejectedly. This was a slight setback but he wasn’t going to give up yet. After all, there were some rookie wise men among them; their beards were just beginning to turn grey. Someone had to set an example for them. Who better than a natural-born leader, the second-in-command of a caravan of wise men? He pointed his finger up at the sky and covered his eyes. He randomly began to jab at different stars across the heavens. “Eeny, meeny, miny mo!”

With great aplomb and enthusiastic gusto, Caspar jabbed out at the sky, choosing the star that his finger landed on. It wasn’t particularly big, and there were much more brighter stars than that. The other wise men, including the R.E teacher and the feminist, looked at each other in confusion. They were following that star? Was it even moving?

Suddenly, the sky exploded with light right from where Caspar was pointing. It grew so bright that, even though they were travelling by night, they could have sworn it was the middle of the day. The light consumed all the other stars until it was only that that filled the sky. After captivating the procession for more than a minute, the light contracted down to the size of an incredibly big and bright star. It began to move towards the west across the sky. The caravan of wise men never resembled more closely to a school of guppies at feeding time. Caspar was the first to recover.

“That is our star!” He exclaimed proudly, grasping the reins of his camel and galloping off after the star as fast as his beast could manage on half a hump of fat. The rest of the procession cheered and chased after him, thankful that they were finally getting somewhere. The more astute wise men noticed that they weren’t heading for Jerusalem but they weren’t astute enough to say anything.

---

“Quick, quick, angel on fire up here!” Cried Gabriel as he floundered at twenty thousand feet above sea level. Flying at night made him nervous and he smoked to calm his nerves, and to make himself look big in front of the other angels. He had only dropped his cigarette for a second and it had got lost in the folds of his robe. After he performed a daring loop-the-loop for no one in particular, the cigarette, which was smouldering quietly, flipped back into his wings, where it proceeded to cause his magnificent, if he did say so himself, wings, to catch fire.

“Please, Boss, can you spare a little rain?” Gabriel looked upwards while trying to pat the fire out pathetically. It was now spreading to his freshly laundered robes. In response to his plea, no rain came. There wasn’t a drop for miles. He could understand why the Boss banned smoking while flying- now. “I don’t need forty days and forty nights of the stuff, just a quick shower!”

Still, he had a job to do. He had to tell some boys about a shepherd. No, wait, he had to tell some shepherds about a baby boy. The Boss’ kid at that. He couldn’t afford to screw this up. They’d clip his wings for sure, and take his halo. Michael was just itching to flatten it into a spearhead.

He had to get his angelic butt over to Bethlehem as soon as possible. But the fire was still spreading. It threatened to do more than singe his perfectly styled hair. He had been up before the dawn of civilisation brushing and combing it, and the amount of flammable hair-care products on it now worried him greatly.

“No! I am the Archangel Gabriel, and I have a job to do for the Big Guy.” he steeled himself, shaking his fist at no one in particular. He wouldn’t let a large fire dampen his spirits. Taking his bearing and opening his wings, Gabriel flew off in the direction of Bethlehem, inadvertently leading several hundred wise men behind him.

---

After several months of travelling, and an expenses bill to shame a small country, the wise men finally arrived in Bethlehem.

“Bethlehem?!” Caspar exclaimed in the town centre. He had been dozing when they had trotted through the gates and hadn’t noticed until now. The star they had been following had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared, though a lot less dramatically; on his way back to Heaven, Gabriel had come a foul with a flight of migrating ducks and had fallen into Lake Galilee.

“So we weren’t following the Star of Jerusalem?” Balthasar asked, confused. Perhaps they could use maps and atlases to guide them instead of stars. They had a whole storeroom full of them back home, just gathering dust. What a waste.

“And a great king won’t be born in the city of David?” Melchior asked, jugglling his frankincense from hand to hand. he had only dropped it a few times. Who was going to notice a few little dents?

“For a group of wise men, we weren’t very wise after all,” an unnamed wise man remarked, hanging his head in shame. Everyone else did likewise. For a time, no one said anything. What could they say?

“Hey, did I hear you guys were looking for a baby?” a scruffy looking man with a crook asked, poking his head out of a nearby door. Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior dismounted their humped steeds and nodded dumbly. The man at the door inclined his head sharply and beckoned them over to him. “There’s a baby in here. You may want to check it out before you leave,”

Their interests piqued by the brief dialogue and they stepped inside the small house. It could be hardly be called a house at all really; it was more like an animal shed. The other wise men, the majority who had been left outside, looked about themselves. Were they supposed to wait or something?

“Has anyone realised that everything we’ve said on the way here has been completely wrong?” an incredibly wise man pointed out in an attempt to break the silence. Mumblings of agreement washed over the caravan. It didn’t help the collective morale of the procession. If anything, it was getting worse by the second.

“Wait,” the wise man who was actually a feminist paused, running over the facts in her head. She had taken off her fake beard a few days ago because it was itchy but still no one had noticed. “Does this mean that instead of king, we’re actually looking for a…”

“It’s a boy!” Caspar dashed out of the building excitedly. Melchior and Balthasar could be seen dancing with delight inside despite a young woman cradling a child and wearing gold earrings snapping at them to stop.

“Oh, damnit!” the feminist swore.